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Paella is one of the great composed rice dishes of the world. Many regions in Spain boast of serving the “finest” rendition, but Valencia, its original home, claims the blue ribbon. Many tourist guides acquiesce. Located close by the sea, the city provides its cooks with a daily supply of fresh seafood. Squid, which blackens the rice with its ink, and mussels are abundant and have become key elements in paella valenciana, along with snails and green beans. That repertoire has been expanded to include a selection of chicken or rabbit pieces; small sausages; other shellfish, such as shrimp, crayfish, or cockles; and other vegetables, such as red bell pepper or artichoke, though not all at once. I like to use shrimp in the shell, but if you don’t think your guests will want to peel their own shrimp, you can cook them as directed, then peel them before returning them to the pan. Paella is traditionally cooked over a charcoal fire in a large, wide, two-handled shallow pan called a paellera. As is common in many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures in which dishes, such as shish kebab and gyros, are cooked over an open fire, the paella cooks are traditionally men because the men own fire. Nowadays, the paellera is more often used indoors, and women as well as men cook the dish. It is always a festive offering, worthy of a get-together of any size, indoors or out. No matter who is cooking, the key to a successful paella is the rice. It must be Spanish or Italian short grain.

A ballotine is a boneless cut of any meat, fowl, or fish, stuffed and wrapped into a bundle and braised. It is like a miniature galantine, except that a galantine is a more elaborate preparation involving the whole beast, or like a roulade, which is a simpler preparation of a piece of meat pounded thin and wrapped around something. All are a form of sausage, and the stuffing can be almost anything edible. Here, the wrap is chicken breast and the something is ham sausage. You might think of it as a sausage with a sausage filling. Fancy though it might sound, its preparation is not difficult, and the outcome is decidedly elegant. Because this is a dish where the chicken takes a lead roll, it is important to have the best-tasting chicken available: organic and with a fatty skin still on the breast. It’s the skin that makes the sausage unctuous. The cheesecloth wrap ensures that the breast remains moist throughout as it braises. I serve the ballotine warm for a main dish with the braising liquid reduced to a sauce. I also serve it chilled as an appetizer. To serve chilled, refrigerate the ballotine overnight still wrapped in cheesecloth. The next day, remove the wrap, slice thinly, and arrange on a platter. Accompany with cornichons, Dijon mustard, and baguette slices.

I first tasted this delight of Asian cooking in 1971, at The Mandarin, Cecilia Chiang’s celebrated fine-dining restaurant in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. It was made with squab, rather than the more standard chicken. At the time, it was an anomaly, and an eye-opener to me about a rich and varied pan-Asian fare that I was just beginning to encounter. Since then, culinary relatives of that Chinese classic have become looked-for menu choices in the Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese restaurants that pepper American neighborhoods. The Southeast Asian versions, called laab, laap, larb, or larp, depending on who’s doing the translating, are basically refreshing sausage salads, sometimes made with pork, suitable for an appetizer or a meal, depending on how you want to serve them. They’re a cinch to make at home. Ground chicken works fine if you are not inclined to mince the meat with a chef’s knife. The advantage of the latter is that the sausage has a more defined texture. The roasted rice powder is an almost-secret treasure of Southeast Asian cuisine. It keeps its fragrance and savor for weeks, waiting in the cupboard for when you would like a dash of something different, subtle and nutty, on top of almost anything.

White gazpacho is a soup from the time long before there were tomatoes in Spain for making chilled red gazpacho, a familiar and beloved paean to summer. But there were almonds, garlic, chickens, and bread. White gazpacho is essentially a mild chicken soup made forceful, filling, and hearty with a garlic-almond mayonnaise and bread soaked in the broth. To make it more sumptuous, I add chicken and almond meatballs, echoing those same ancient ingredients. It is ultrarich. A bowlful with a side dish of sturdy-leaf salad garnished with orange slices suffices for a meal. A tip: The recipe calls for a total of 3/4 cup slivered blanched almonds, divided into 1/4 cup portions for three different steps. To facilitate the division, toast the whole amount of almonds in a microwave or toaster oven until the nuts begin to brown and have a toasty smell, 5 to 6 minutes, depending on how fresh they are. Set aside 1/4 cup of the toasted slivers for garnishing the soup. Pulverize the remaining 1/2 cup in a food processor until reduced to a paste. Divide the paste into two parts, one for the sausage, one for the soup.

Uncomplicated, straight from the heart of the cook to the mouth and belly of the diner via the stove, a bowl of matzo balls in chicken soup is a sure-bet comfort food. With chicken in the matzo balls and the homemade “twice-cooked” broth, that simple bowl of comfort food becomes a substantial meal. It is a good idea to make the broth and meatball mixture the day before, so that when you’re ready to eat, there’s not a long wait. Also, that way you can use the fat that congeals on top of the broth, the schmaltz, in place of butter in the matzo balls.

Shepherd’s pie is a signature dish in the pubs of England and Ireland, sometimes made with lamb, as here, and sometimes with beef, in which case it is called cottage pie. The idea is the same: a simple meat pie made with a mirepoix—onion, carrot, celery—under a top crust of mashed potatoes. There’s no cheese in the mashed potatoes, but when the pie is baked, the crust is somehow enriched through the alchemy of cooking and tastes as though there were. Shepherd’s pie is usually made with leftover cooked lamb. Swapping that for quick and easy homemade lamb sausage is my revisionism, to give the humble pie a fresh and lively taste. Also, to gussy it up, I use tiny pearl onions so the onion element has a more defined presence in the pie. The horseradish is also my whim, to give the dish an acrid lilt that helps lift it above what might otherwise be humdrum fare. Fresh horseradish root is often available in produce stores and supermarkets around Passover for Jewish customers; wasabi root, though not exactly the same botanically, is similar and it is available around the New Year for Japanese customers. Like fresh ginger, horseradish root can be stored in the refrigerator almost indefinitely, as long as it is kept dry.

Tagine is the signature dish, harissa is the signature hot condiment, and merguez is the signature spicy sausage of North Africa. Quince would be more usual for the fruit, but they are only fleetingly available in late fall, and the stew is quite divine throughout the year. So, I use apples, available all the time. Couscous, the signature tiny-bead pasta of North Africa that fluffs up in a hot-water soak without further cooking, is the accompaniment, the bed, in any variation.

When chorizo crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain to North Africa, the meat of it, pork, was swapped for lamb. The mostly Muslim North Africans don’t eat pork. The feisty essence of chorizo was not lost in the translation, however: the seasonings remained pretty much the same, with regional and personal variations, as always. A touch of cinnamon here, dried whole red chiles instead of milder ground paprika, maybe some cumin, maybe not, and always garlic. On either side of the straits, it’s a vivacious sausage to use in dishes that want definite sausage input. Here is the lamb version called merguez; for the pork version, see page 24.

The Vendy Awards began in 2004 as a benefit to raise funds for New York street food vendors who were struggling to establish their right to operate in the city. The issue in dispute was that the city wanted to tax the street vendors even though they didn’t operate from brick-and-mortar venues. (The issue of who has to pay tax to whom is, of course, age-old.) Fortunately, it was finally settled, and the awards became an annual New York City celebration of street food, with an informal competition for best stand decided by popular vote. On a given day in early autumn, vendors from all around the city assemble in a park (a different one each year) and proffer their take-away delights to an ever-growing number of fans. The flavors and aromas of Pakistani and Indian cooking aced the show three out of four times, sort of: In 2006, Sammy the Halal Man won the prize for his Pakistani chicken and rice biriyani. In 2007, the Dosa Man won for his vegan dosa. In 2008, though the Calexico burrito and taco vendor won the juried prize, the popular vote went to Biriyani Cart’s Meru Sikder for his Bangladeshi lamb and rice dish. In other words, the populist Vendys confirm the wide appeal of foods from countries along the ancient spice route. Note: You can also serve the meatballs and topping and garnish elements as a biriyani dish, over steamed basmati rice rather than folded into a flatbread.

This lamb, green bean, and tomato soup-stew, known as fasoulia in the home of my childhood, was the by-product of a regular event: my father dissecting a leg of lamb into its parts, from the most highly treasured, neatly cubed pieces for shish kebab to the fattier but still tender parts for grinding into sausage. A sidebar of the ritual was putting the bone and all the gristly bits into a pot, covering them with water, and gently simmering them into a broth for fasoulia. Even though the dish was a by-product of making shish kebab, it enjoyed a humble stature on our dinner table. These days when I desire a taste of lamb home cooking and am not deconstructing a leg of lamb, I use a bit of purchased ground lamb for meatballs. The green beans are key here, and though I usually turn up my nose at frozen vegetables, I make an exception for fasoulia, so that it can be enjoyed throughout the year. I find this soup-stew doesn’t need anything in the way of a side dish. A slice of bread, a spoon, and family company suffice, but Armenians would include pilaf on the side.

Nowadays, dolmas are standard fare throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus. But it is interesting to ponder how they became so in ancient lands that never had New World ingredients until seafarers carried them to the Old World on their return journeys. To complicate the story, they put ashore in Atlantic ports, so it was still a long trek to get to the eastern Mediterranean. Nonetheless, they did, once again demonstrating the scope and power of food as a pathway of global interconnections. Adding a bed of potatoes as infrastructure in this dolma is a particularly Greek touch, and a good one. The potatoes soak up the juices rendered as the vegetables cook and collapse into them, making a crude sauce on the bottom of the dish. I prefer green bell peppers, but it seems these days red bells are equally, if not more, favored, so I make a mix of them, including some yellow and orange ones that add sunny color to the array.

Hmong farmers, fleeing Laos to escape persecution, began arriving in the United States in the latter half of the 1970s, with the majority arriving in the 1980s. Most of them eventually settled where they could continue their agrarian life: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, and California, especially in the fertile land around Fresno, California. This occurrence is especially remarkable to me because it is where my Armenian relatives also settled three generations ago to farm in one of most bountiful growing places in the world. And I benefit still from that abundance. Notwithstanding the lengthy trip to the Bay Area, Hmong-grown vegetables from Fresno appear in glorious array at my local Oakland farmers’ market every Saturday, alongside the Armenian stand from the same area with its effusive display of fruits, heirloom tomatoes, eggplants, and Armenian cucumbers. Among the Hmong staples for sale are sturdy Asian brassicas, such as Chinese cabbage, Chinese mustard greens, and choys of several kinds; luffa (ridged gourd) and Chinese bitter melon; okra and small pickling cucumbers for my holiday pickle jars; and long beans for my Asian-to-new-Californian dishes. Together these two vendors supplement each other and pay tribute to the marriage of Asian and Mediterranean culinary ingredients in California’s hot and prolific Central Valley. It’s enough to incite a food frenzy and cook up something healthful and delicious, such as this hearty yet delicate Hmong-style main-dish soup.

By curious circumstance, I found myself in Vienna in 1968, shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and just over a decade after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. I was there for the International Philosophical Congress, which didn’t hold my interest long. There was much more to see and experience outside the confines of academia. Aside from the eternal beauty of Vienna as a center for music, the fine arts, and fine pastries, the streets were filled with people—Czechs as well as Hungarians—who had taken refuge in the welcoming city following the invasion of their countries. The energizing buzz over the politics of the time was everywhere, expressed in Czech, Russian, Hungarian Magyar (a language unrelated to nearly all other European languages and incomprehensible to ears unfamiliar with it), and in other tongues as well. But, as always, the food served as a binding, cohesive force. The city’s dining establishments, casual bistros and more formal restaurants alike, were filled with east Europeans, Viennese locals, and tourists like me, all looking for something good to eat. In addition to the impossible-to-resist Viennese fare, there were many Hungarian dishes which had become a familiar part of Viennese cooking. That is when and where I discovered the essential tastes and food combinations of east European cuisine, and, more important, that no matter what, food of the homeland is never left behind.

The countries of east Europe are a disparate lot, continually at odds over issues of religion and governance. But, as nearby neighbors, they share a cooking culture over and above those differences. This sausage and the following recipe for Hungarian meatballs in a sour cream sauce are my imaginative combining of the foods that this corner of the world can share without rancor or strife. The sausage, formed into balls and sautéed, can also be served with cucumbers in a light vinaigrette and potato salad dressed with dill and sour cream for a meze plate.

Partially cooking the potato and chilling it before grating serves two purposes: the potato gets thoroughly cooked within the sausage mix, which it won’t if it is added raw, and the sausage doesn’t turn out soft and mushy, which it will if the potato is cooked and mashed first. I prefer to get a jump start on this dish by preparing the potato a day ahead and chilling it overnight. But if you’re in a rush, several hours will do the trick, in which case, use the freezer to hasten the chilling. Rather than the standard Swedish accompaniment of mashed potatoes, I serve the sausage with a side of colorful, almost candylike roasted beets topped with sour cream.

I dub my Italianate beef meatballs with a nugget of cheese in the center polpette, which in Italian means “round food”—as in meatball, fish ball, rice ball—because it is a fun word to say and it describes their jolly, amenable nature. They accommodate meatball needs from cocktail-size tidbits for dipping into cherry tomato chutney (page 17) to large balls bouncing in a hearty red pasta sauce (page 73).

Whether the tomatoes are fresh or canned is a seasonal matter: in summer, choose fresh ones; in winter, use canned ones. Both make a delicious, rich sauce for braising meatballs. When using fresh tomatoes, I like to peel them and I don’t bother to seed them, but that is the cook’s choice, depending on time constraints and inclination. The herbs are also a matter of choice: fresh or dried basil (the most usual addition), marjoram, or tarragon all enhance the sauce with a mildly sweet herbal presence; oregano or bay add a more assertive flavor. Spaghetti is traditional for this everyday, home-style dish, but other shapes, such as bow ties, small rigatoni, or penne, will also capture and hold the sauce as the pasta is lifted from plate to mouth. For the meatballs, I like to use my polpette, because their cheese centers add an extra oomph to the dish. But you can also use meatballs fashioned from either sweet Italian or Tuscan sausage with good results.

In a cross-continental sausage loaf reminiscent of French pâtés, beef, pork, and veal are combined in equal amounts with bread crumbs to make a more pillowy loaf. The California twist is replacing the traditional ketchup “icing” with pavers of sun-dried tomato across the top. You can serve it warm for dinner, American style, with a side of mashed potatoes, or French style, chilled until firm enough to slice thin for an hors d’oeuvre plate. The cooking vessel can be as ordinary as a standard aluminum loaf pan or, if you are serving it warm, a more table-worthy clay pot or round soufflé dish.

In this pan-African menu, disparate parts of the continent are melded in a culinary way. The sausage is inherited from the Dutch colonialists in South Africa; the cashews, which were first brought from Brazil by the Portuguese, import a taste of Nigeria on the west coast and Mozambique on the east coast; and the spiced butter, called niter kibbeh, wafts in gently from Ethiopia. The rice and collard greens are pan-global.

Hamburgers reign supreme in the annals of American food, indeed in the annals of fast food around the world. Establishments that proffer them have made incursions into seemingly unlikely places to the extent that it is hardly surprising to see hamburgers on menus almost anywhere from Paris to Beijing. In fact, the humble beef patties have become such big business that there’s just no stopping them. And what is this icon of American enterprise? The answer is simple: it’s ground beef seasoned with salt. In other words, hamburger is quintessential sausage, and people love it. So do I. In fact, hamburgers-for-dinner is one of my default meals. For my house hamburger, I choose organic, pasture-raised beef, which, though slightly more expensive, is definitely tastier and more healthful than average ground beef. I lightly season the meat with salt and chill it for a few hours to let the salt do its work tenderizing the meat and making it more succulent. The Dijon mayo, pickled onions, and crunchy lettuce are fundamental, as are the artisanal buns, my favorite being ciabatta buns. Where are the tomatoes? I left them by the wayside in the development of my house hamburger. Their acid element and red color is supplied by the pickled onions. But, sometimes I add sliced heirloom tomatoes if it’s tomato season, or perhaps a splash of ketchup on one side of the bun. A hamburger is, after all, a personal thing, subject to whims of the moment.